Success: Browned Butter Ice Cream [omg]

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

You guys. This might be one of the best ice creams ever. Up there with homemade molasses icream, homemade cookies & cream ice cream, and Jeni's cognac fig and goat cheese ice cream.

This is Browned Butter Ice Cream, modified from Jeni's Splendid Ice Cream at Home. You can find the recipe from MyHomespunHome, here. Jeni's recipes always add so many toppings. In this case...we just left them out. It's delicious as-is, especially if you can get the milk solids a few shades shy of black (i.e., super dark brown). The darker you can get 'em without burning, the better. And having gotten the fats super dark, this ice cream is amazing. I also used our Kitchen Aid stand mixer ice cream attachment, and the secret to those (as always) is to fully freeze the bowl overnight, and to leave the ice cream mixture in the fridge for a few hours before churning. 'Comes out right every time.

Ingredients might play some part in all this fantastic flavor. I splurged a tiny bit on ~$5-worth of fancy butters and cream cheese. It's all so fantastic, I just want to dunk my head in that 6-cup bowl of heavenly butter ice cream. It has a bit of a greasy after-feel, but that is a small price to pay for eating butter.





To brown butter, you basically just melt it for a bit until the milk solids separate from the butter fat (i.e., oil). And then you keep boiling the melted butter until the milk solids turn a nice shade of brown. There's an interesting point where the mixture is all foam-y, and then suddenly, the foam disappears and you have separation! It's a sort of nifty food science moment. This process yields something known as clarified butter or ghee (if you caramelize the milk solids). 'Supposedly delicious on all sorts of dishes that you'd ordinarily use butter for: on roasted vegetables, mashed potatoes, on bread, or inside an apple pie. Not too shabby!